Posts by NPCO543 12 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2012
Agreed. I planned on building a 3990 system for rendering, waited a year and a half looking for them in stock at non-2X scalper prices, and finally gave up and went back to Intel. Sorry AMD, you lost a customer for the next 5 years minimum. If you don't want to sell me your products, I'll go elsewhere.
"Apple HAS figured it out (my many shares are looking pretty good here!) and the "feel" of the different devices is adapted to the different environments."
Just love it when people pad their opinions with gloating about their wealth, it gives the rest of their comment such credibility.
The only thing Apple has figured out is how brain dead most consumers are. Show them a shiny object and they'll throw their money at it. Sooner or later, people will wake up, and Apple will be in trouble. Their patent rampage is clear evidence that they're living in the past, trying to slow everyone to their snail's pace, as opposed to looking forward and leading by example.
For as much as Microsoft rightly deserves to be criticized, between them, Google and Apple, Apple is dead last when it comes to actual innovation.
Saturation is likely a big part of it. Combine that with a lack of new features or apps that demand more advanced hardware, and you have a repeat of pretty much exactly the same cliff the PC industry went over.
I see no reason for the foreseeable future to replace either my smartphone or mobile tablet. And to be completely honest, unless the inherent limitations of mobile OS based tablets are eliminated, I wouldn't purchase another one period. I bought a Surface Pro 2 last year, and it's so inherently more capable and useful, I just don't see any value in lesser tablets. Their capabilities are just too compromised.
Go here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/upgrade-product-key-only
1- Download the setup programs for both 8 and 8.1.
2- Run the setup for 8, put in your valid product key and click next.
3- As soon as it starts downloading the full Windows 8 setup files, quit the installer.
4- Run the 8.1 setup (it might error out the first time, just run it again) and it'll download 8.1.
5- Once it's downloaded, save out an ISO or write it to a USB flash drive.
6- Search for a MSDN 8.1 product key to install 8.1.
7- After install, activate it with your legit product key.
8- Profit
"...and when XP goes out of support next year, my brother is going to have to move to Linux as well"
Because XP will stop functioning when support ends??
Comments like these never make sense. If you want to switch to Linux, by all means, do so. I have it installed on a system or two here and it's fine. But don't resort to ridiculous excuses like this. I still have XP on a few older systems, and they will remain on XP until I take them out of service or they suffer some hardware failure. The OS operates, and will operate, as good tomorrow or next year or 5 years from now as it does today.
Metro: The computer boots and you see an unorganized grid of tiles, a few with some useful information but the vast majority with nothing more than the same icons we've seen for decades. No useful information, all strewn over a scrolling screen with no ability to collapse groups to save space. Throw in no ability to run anything in anything but full screen or a fixed 80/20 split (staying in Metro). Throw in many UI elements and tasks totally hidden off screen and many requiring a multiple of mouse actions to accomplish common tasks. And finally throw in the necessity to jarringly return to this screen from the desktop, over and over, to accomplish common tasks.
Explorer: The computer boots to a familiar desktop with an efficient task bar and start menu which holds all installed programs and system activities in a small, optimized, collapsible, efficient list. You can run one or many applications full screen, windowed and in any combination a user chooses to make optimal use of desktop/monitor space. Files can be held and organized on the desktop to the user's liking, or the desktop can be kept clear... again, to the user's liking.
So how's that for feedback? And what, pray tell, will your rebuttal be? More of the same - you're not using Metro right, you haven't given it enough time, you're sticking your head in the sand? How about actually addressing any of the issues any of us have raised over the past months? And might you work for Microsoft? You seem awfully critical of complaints about Metro.
I did say why it sucks - I said it feels shockingly incomplete, which it does. And what hope would any of us "Preview Participants" have that our feedback would be valued when despite countless accounts of usability issues, Microsoft has done nothing but march forward, release after release.
And I did try to get used to the Metro interface. I installed it without modification on a system used by the entire family, and it was only after several months of daily use and continuous frustration and complaints by family members did I work around Metro. We all learned how to use Metro, so this isn't an issue of not understanding the new paradigm, it's an issue of the new paradigm just sucking in real-world use.
We're not sticking out heads in the sand, we've been explaining exactly why Metro sucks on a desktop system, and Microsoft's reaction has been clear - tough luck, get used to it. So with Windows 8 now RTM, it's pointless to elaborate beyond simply saying it sucks.
If anyone is burring their head in the sand, it's the pro-Metro folks who have done nothing but ignore scores of specific and detailed feedback.
I would qualify as one of Microsoft's "Preview participants", and I think Windows 8 sucks. I've tried each version and even the latest has a shockingly incomplete feel to it. I've used various utilities to bypass the Metro start screen and restore a Start menu to make it usable, but even still, it absolutely doesn't feel like a real product.
As the preview releases have been given away to anyone who wants them, it's really dangerous to look at the number of participants as an endorsement of the condition of the OS.
Actually, if you really think about it, despite how it may appear at first glance, Apple doesn't compete or innovate very well.
They typically enter already established markets after sitting on the sidelines for many years observing what works and what doesn't. Their products, while very well designed, integrated and user friendly, are usually rather light on features and capabilities, and they are typically slow to add new features. Consider:
-The first iPhone didn't ship with an App Store and, as such, it was terribly limited in it's functionality.
-The iOS notification center is a complete copy of what was available on Android since it's inception.
-iOS lacked multitasking until version 4
-iOS still doesn't support any home screen widgets.
-Even the current iPhone doesn't offer many features common on many other smartphones - 4G, NFC, removable storage.
These aren't signs of a company who competes very well. What Apple DOES do well is marketing. They have the ability to create intense, almost blind desire for their products, regardless of the comparative capabilities of those products.
Apple very much has a problem competing, and that's precisely why they've resorted to litigation to stall competition. Apple enters markets with an initial "Bang", and then rests on it's laurels for as long as possible, repackaging the same basic device in new shells over and over, adding the bare minimum of improvements to not make it blatantly obvious that they're behind the curve. Whether this is because they want to do individual products "right" and not just release numerous, lower quality products is more or less irrelevant. The fact is that other companies bring more, and more advanced, products to market with an acceptable quality and better price than Apple can, or is willing, to do.
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